Full Circle
by Demyrie
Summary: I had expected so much from that moment, when I'd finally see him alive… and I won’t say I didn’t turn it over in my head. Fantasize about it. But then I realized... he didn't even KNOW." BoosterxBeetle super-friendship, SPOILERS FOR BOOSTER GOLD 6. YAY.


A/N: My lovely, obnoxiously excitable boyfriend loves to buy comics for me, then read them to me over the phone. I REALLY wanted to resist finding out about BoosterGold 6 in advance (because I've been waiting for a breathing Ted FOR AGES), but he had to go and read a monologue to me—namely, where Booster saves Beetle. It inspired this, because I thought about… what it would mean to just suddenly re-enter somebody's time to save them from things they didn't know about.

I thought about Booster in pain, mainly, because what he had gone through when Ted died… well, Ted couldn't know that, could he? All the hell that happened afterward, too: it would be nonexistent for Ted. But Booster suffered all along, regardless. So… yeah! Unrequited understanding, kinda.

(OH. And also, this is written JUST with that short monologue in mind, without knowing what came afterwards: because I sincerely thought that Ted couldn't know what had happened. This IS different from the comic issue, if you've gotten your hands on it, obviously! Just my prescient vision! … With a Beetle who somehow got tied up in ropes D: Am I kinky or something?)

OHMYGOD WHAT A SATISFYING ISSUE. Seriously. I totally expected the gooshing platonic man-love to be horribly downplayed and forgotten. It was OUT THERE. AH. So satisfying. Warm like soup. Booster aching to hear Ted's laugh was like AUUUUGGHH.

Booster loves his Ted so much. Ted loves his Booster equally-so. Sigh.

-.-.-.-.-

Full Circle

-.-.-.-.-

"Ted."

At first, it was the closest to bliss I've ever felt.

Next, it hurt.

Why? He was safe. I'd done it, and the feeling was better than any game I'd ever won. Bliss is the word: I feel like I learned it just for this moment, or sucked it out of some commercial, because normally I'd just settle for 'happy'. Then my new word soured, decomposing and sticking to the sides of my ribs. It hurt, I realized. The whole thing. Why in the world did it _hurt_ to realize that I had come out on top in a way that _mattered_ for the first time; that Ted was staring at me like I was a god, a savior, a freak, a friend, and the last thing on this earth he expected to see?

It was because of the last part. Because he _didn't know_.

In that span of time where we were newly safe on the stuffy tile floor, and we weren't gasping and we weren't breathing—those shell-shocked mental cramps when you've stopped _surviving_ but you're still not quite sure of the next seven minutes of your life, muscles still like glass—I realized that something was missing. I had expected so much from that moment, when I finally saw him alive… I won't say I didn't turn it over in my head. Fantasize about it. I did; a lot. Even before I knew it was an option, I would grind all of Bats' excuses into clipped, iron-scented images I didn't realize were plans. Rescue dreams, woven through with lunatic, adrenaline-wet veins. It was me saying 'no' to that bastard in the stupidest, basest way ever. Just no.

No, he didn't die because he acted stupid. No, you could have _helped_ him. Most of all, no—you are not innocent in this.

I'd waited a long time to finally do it, that it'd…grown pretty big in my head. Outgrown its proverbial (and realistic) britches, kinda. I would be lying if I said fireworks were out of the question during my much-awaited Saving-Ted moment, and fireworks are just too cinematic to be healthy. So I realized, as the blood dripped from his battered nose and he just stared at me with his blue eyes, swamp green behind the goggles—his dorky, chipped, bulging, goddamned wonderful dung-beetle goggles sitting in one piece on his goddamn head and not in amber needles on the floor, glinting against black folded batwings—that this was falling short, somehow. That he just didn't know the whole story. That this—what was happening right now, what I'd waited for, _fought_ for--was so much more important to me than it was to him.

Which is… funny. Because it's his life we're talking about. And it even hurt to know that.

Heh. If Skeets were here, he'd bite his digital tongue. Like I haven't heard the joke in seven languages: _it hurts to think, right, Booster_?

No. It hurt to _know_.

It hurt to know that I was older. I had lived through more years than him—not that it mattered to my outside. The barnacles of time had all melted into me, shaken loose and swallowed by my glossy future genes, devious, indulgent little machines they are. A few years, where? No one could tell. No one would question. No one would care… but me. Because at that second, I felt every bit of it like it was pooled beneath my eyes, stretching and weighting and warping my face.

It hurt to know that I was older than _him_, older than he'd ever _been_ at one point—at that one horrible point, where I'd outlived Ted.

He didn't know what it was like, living those days and months and lives without him. How could he? No one ever sees their own death, or experiences it: funerals are for the living, right? Nothing like those… ghost images I got as Supernova. Call me privileged, floating around like a specter; soaking in the world after my 'passing'. Technically, I saw myself die. Hell, I even stood by while I died: talk about the ultimate masochist.

Can't say I got away from my death without any damages. Hardly know anyone who does, Green Lanterns excepted.

When Booster Gold… sold himself one last time, to the entirety of Metropolis, nothing changed. It wasn't even the death of another hero, or the death of a second-stringer. I realized I'd always been cramming myself in between other heroes, and by piling on top of them… well, when 'Booster' left, there wasn't even a hole. I hadn't worked for it hard enough, or started at the bottom. My death was not what I'd expected, of course, but it was everything I feared to be true. Everything that made me… come back and say those things to myself. Pretty sick, huh? But Ted…

Ted didn't leave a hole either, I know. People still screwed up his name, or asked after him like he'd gone on a Hawaiian-shirt-and-sandals sabbatical: I can't tell you how that made my skin crawl, and even that reminded me of him. But Ted never wanted to pile, or scramble or grasp or feed. He just wanted to help. To help, and to live. Not to die in the basement of some goddamned government conspiracy with a head wound wind could whistle through, like normal humans generally do. You know.

But basically, he stopped where he stopped. He didn't know what it was like to live without him. He didn't know what I'd lived through: what he'd died and left me to.

In his own eyes, right now, scared as they were… Theodore Kord had never been anything but living and breathing and constant and dicky with a heart condition and so much _worry_ but still that grim hope, still thinking and existing—and that was one conviction we'd never share. I knew what lay the other way. I'd come from it. I'd fought my way tooth and nail out of it, and here he just _stared._

To him, I'd only saved his life. To me, I'd saved his and one more—my own. It was good both ways.

But what hurt the most is that he didn't know how hard I _tried_. How much I did, how much I'd gotten beaten up and around in the process. It was all for his sake, and there he was… quivering and mussed with bruises and blood, hardly knowing how to close his mouth. Knowing that I'd saved his life; not knowing what it took from inside me and outside me to _do_ it.

All this time, and I still find myself saying the same thing: he would've been so proud.

Yeah, "would've". Because I can never tell him now. "Greatest hero the world will never know" junk again. That, and a one-way ticket to Arkham. Either or.

"Ted," I repeated, untangling the rope from him and hearing it snap and clack against the tile. It felt so good just to say it and know that someone could answer—_claim_ the name_-_-here and now, or over the phone, or… "Ted, you still breathing?"

He was still breathing, and I knew it. In fact, he was kinda working up a wet spot on my suit: he was that close and_ that_ capable of breathing. Mostly, I just wanted to hear him talk.

"Ted? Is everything alright?" Dan Garrett asked him, and I hoped Beetle—_my _Beetle—was too shell-shocked to realize that Dan was talking to a complete stranger and wasn't good at pretending otherwise. Bad actor, bad time-line: danger, emotional trauma may ensue. The fact that Dan Garrett was dead didn't help, but mostly, Ted just blanched. I worried for him, even as Max lay bleeding. The second the dense ropes fell, his hand was over his heart and his chest, both pieces of him swaddled in a torn suit. Ruined.

"What's… the matter with you?" He finally gulped, wetting his still-slack mouth. He was gaping over my shoulder: well, at least I knew where the rest of the Beetles were.

Still in shock, though. As I made to smile and pull him to his feet, he redirected his glossy gawk straight into my face, searing his however-many-years-thank-god-he-still-has-more-to-go away with a simple desperation for _sense_: coming from a man who usually knew everything, it felt like I'd been hit by a searchlight. My eyes nearly watered.

"You're in—bed—" Ted sputtered, grasping at a smoky something entirely too recent for him, and entirely too vague for me. I winced. Time continuity, time continuity. My arm squirmed around his back as I hefted him up, and it helped me think.

"At the hospital, I know."

He… would've been so proud. At least at how I was pulling this off, if nothing else.

"And—you're _burned_, you're--" he mumbled dizzily, hand drifting up; I only relaxed when it passed his heart and settled on his temple. His thankfully-in-one-piece temple: he's only allowed to whistle through his lips, as long as I'm here. My arm tightened and my teeth felt clean and white and ready to burst out of my mouth in full force when I smiled.

"The best friend you've ever had. I know."

Then it sank in, and maybe it wasn't so bad anymore. Because as much as I'd missed his laugh, I'd missed the smile that always comes before it. That promise smile. His lips were piled high with angry red welts and his smile was lumpy, but even if he were missing a tooth or two, it still would've been gold. No, I thought, it wasn't so bad.

Because he knew now, a little. Just wait till he _saw_ it in me: the good parts, the parts that… maybe he _would_ be proud of, even if he didn't know why. Even if he threw me looks that say I'm up to something and _maybe_ he wants in on it, or just called me names first. Before he realized I wasn't faking it, because we had _time_.

Because the future was still there. Would always be, now.

In some ways, I'm smarter than him. In some ways, I'll always find him a little bit lacking, just because he wasn't there, and it hurts to be privileged in that way—to have that… what was it? The burden? The dark knowledge of what could have happened. Damn, it hurts to be smart. All the extra stuff that happened… I can't even tell him about it. It was real to me, but not to him. If I tell him, he'll think I'm crazy. Or that I'm trying to pile, like usual.

I want to re-earn his trust, but I don't ever want to test it. Never on _this_.

He smiled like white dots were still flashing in front of him, but his aim was right on when he reached around and grabbed me. Flopped tight and close and we were living again. He was sweaty. I was soaked.

He laughed, because it was the only thing to do.

"_God_."

"Yes?" I couldn't help it. Felt a little like him, right then. My best friend was back, and I'm the one who brought him. Then I laughed because he laughed and because laughing was still our first and last resort. Full circle.

Full… circle.

He wilted back from me and let my arm catch him and we were buddies again, drifting home after beers at the bar, except there were a whole bunch of man-bugs around. Bugs that… maybe Ted could've taken a few costume tips from. Ted eyed them, but his gaze stuck on Dan. Suddenly I felt even better: the more it went on, it looked like Dan was the freak and the savior and the god, and I was confined to 'the friend'. We would… deal with that later.

No one had looked at that bastard on the floor yet. We weren't going to. I was still too proud of the sound of Ted's unsteady breaths and the way he felt, living next to me. _Again_.

"Is anyone going to tell me what's going on?" My Beetle asked weakly. The other Beetles jostled around and didn't touch each other, but the sense of friendly connection was _there_. Call it the bug bond: those superheroes unfortunate enough to be named after something as mediocre as a dung beetle… well, they gotta stick together.

Like… dung.

"No one." Jaime smiled: while the facial twitch was tight and aqua and dazzling, his yellow eyes shone through the mask and made it more human. "Thought we'd let you guess until we got bored."

"So long as you give me twenty-three lifelines. If no other deranged ex-managers storm in, I've got all night," Ted sighed, and went a little softer against my arm. I went a little softer against him, and my arm curled in tighter and he never really noticed. His heartbeat was strong. Radiating out of him. Promising.

The best thing about names is that they're infinite. With names, there is no past, present or future tense. It's just… a name. More than a word. A possibility. A promise. A person. Someone you never had before, and will never have again—unless you're as lucky a bastard as I am. Because I lost Ted; I lost the Blue Beetle. Mostly, I lost my best friend.

After fighting through hell, I was allowed back into the place I should've always been: next to him, believing when no one else would. I was so, so lucky. So I said it again, laughing, because it was the only thing left to say:

"Ted."

"What?"

"Just… Ted."


End file.
